ned. The paper ends with a series of conclusions formulated on the basis of the provided review.
Lacan's notion of the unconscious can be directly related to the notions of Freud. The unconscious, as characterized by Freud (1940, 1953), was a state of mind containing information of which the conscious mind was unaware and which took special efforts to access to consciousness. Pervin (1980) describes the Freudian view of the unconscious and the methods that can be used to access it as follows:
Through the analysis of dreams, slips of the tongue, neurosis, psychosis, works of art, and rituals, Freud...detailed the qualities of unconscious life...as alogical (opposites can stand for the same thing), disregarding of time (events of different periods can coexist) and disregarding of space (size and distance are neglected...). There is a fluidity and plasticity to phenomena...(p.39).
Freud spoke not of the structure of the unconscious so much as the general structure of mind. According to his views, the mind was structured in terms of three layers: (1) the conscious which was said to be related to phenomena persons were aware of at any given moment; (2) the preconscious or phenomena of which people are aware provided that they attend to them; and (3) the unconscios or those phenomena requiring special circumstances for awareness. Like Lacan, Freud felt that symbols were an important part of unconscious thought so that a penis can be represented by the smbol of a snake or a nose or an engulfing mother by an octopus.
Freud stated that the unconscious was never directly observed and that it was a repository for notions, concepts, and thoughts which were to fear engendering for a given individual to examine at the conscious level. The ego was characterized as working to keep fearful unconscious material from consciousness, and in this sense was termed the "executive" of personality--albeit not the sole controller. Whereas the ...